Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2, Traitors, IPL, Kapil Sharma: How streaming is replicating television, the very beast it wanted to tame

Then came the pandemic in 2020-22 when India, confined to its homes, warmed up to streaming to such an extent that it’d be an ordeal to bring them back to cinemas even when the lockdowns ended. Streaming became a habit, and the Indian audience its slaves. The victim was not only cinema, but also television. Cable television and direct-to-home services, once a household necessity, were replaced by smart TVs and fire sticks. Streaming turned out to be for satellite what satellite was for VHS (Video Home System) and Doordarshan in the 1990s.

But now, as cinemas and other avenues of entertainment open up after the pandemic, streaming can’t sustain the skyrocketing growth it once registered in India during a couple of years. So, 2023 brought a shift in direction — the streaming, once known for being a substitute to television, started to embrace parts of the latter that appealed to India’s masses. It was no longer the rebel kid, but that backbencher in a classroom who wanted to get away with the exam by peeping into the class topper’s papers.

Smriti Irani, former I&B Minister, recently claimed that last year, the television industry and the streaming industry accounted for a revenue of Rs 30,000 crore and Rs 24,000 crore, respectively. She rallied for the two industries to unite and generate content together instead of competing with each other. This month, she’s set to reprise her iconic character of Tulsi Virani in Ekta Kapoor’s landmark daily soap Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, which will be available for viewing on both its native home StarPlus and its streaming counterpart, JioHotstar.

Sameer Nair, who was the head of programming at StarPlus back in 2000 when Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi first premiered, believes the show can still work as well as it did back then, but only if the story has adapted to the times and the audience it’s catering to. “Honestly, it’s not got so much to do with streaming or TV. On JioHotstar, their strong, long-performing show has always been Anupamaa. On SonyLIV, for the longest time, Bade Achhe Lagte Hain used to be their #1,” argued Nair, in an interview with SCREEN. Not every TV show with an immense recall value would fare as well on streaming, as one saw in the case of Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai – Take 2.

“I think the streaming of daily soaps allows more flexibility to its primary audience — the homemakers, the mothers, the elderly women. They get the option to access it any time of the day, something they wouldn’t be able to do when it aired at a very late slot of 10:30 pm on TV,” said a former StarPlus official, who’s also worked with JioHotstar. “At that time, these women used to wait for their husbands and kids to fall asleep after watching Kaun Banega Crorepati so that they could get their guilty hour of Kyunki. But now, they can stream it anytime, without guilt! It’s not just Ekta and Smriti Irani, but also the streaming that’s empowering them this time,” they added.

Nair, who’s now the Managing Director at Applause Entertainment and collaborates with a host of streaming platforms, saw this televisionization of streaming coming from a mile. “Streaming is just settling down now. It just means they’re going for a wider audience by catering to the largest common denominator. But streaming can also cater to niches. The good thing is both can co-exist on streaming. So you can do both a Kyunki and an Adolescence. The technology allows you to do that. On TV, you could be either a GEC or a niche channel,” he reasons.

Why does then an Anurag Kashyap then blame Netflix India for entering a partnership with Ekta’s Balaji Telefilms instead of commissioning an Indian version of Adolescence? Why does he call Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos the “definition of dumb” when he opines that they should’ve launched the platform in India with something “more populist” than Sacred Games? “That’s because if all the energies and resources are directed towards a populist form of entertainment, then a niche or a less mainstream show has to really elbow its way in to get the streamer’s attention. Streaming was supposed to enable and empower these, and not really use them as a token to show how cutting-edge they are, whenever it suits their narrative,” says a screenwriter who’s worked with both Kashyap and Netflix India.

When asked, on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast People by WTF, to react to the shift in programming of Netflix India with CID and The Great Indian Kapil Show, he played the diversity card — If it’s not for you, it’s for someone else. But a former Netflix India employee claims diversity is more of a buzzword than a thought-through corporate strategy. “Reed Hastings is an LA guy so he really cares for the movies. He’s the one who started Netflix as a DVD business. He’s a true disruptor,” they tell us, adding, “But when Sarandos took over, there was a change in direction. Since every country Netflix is in is culturally so different from each other, the only common point they could find between them was diversity. And that became their corporate strategy, so to say. But make no mistake, it was always made clear that the priority is numbers.”

The Great Indian Kapil Show is in its third season on Netflix India.

When SCREEN asked Tanya Bami, Series Head at Netflix India, why shows like The Royals, Rana Naidu, and Mismatched got renewed despite getting a large chunk of negative reviews from critics, she said, “Love from everyone is critical. As a human being, you seek that affirmation. But in terms of a stack order, we’re very clear it’s the love of the audience that matters to us.” That became very apparent with Netflix India’s programming in the last three years. “We were never categorically asked to sell some shows more. They wouldn’t say that because that doesn’t go with their brand image. But you figured, with the kind of people they hired or the kind of shows they greenlit, that the focus had changed. There are so many ex-Balaji faces in Netflix India now,” added the former employee.

Balaji has been a champion of broadcast, but it’s also tried its hands at streaming. Ekta, who has straddled cinema, TV, and OTT, believes they serve different purposes — community viewing, family viewing, and personal viewing respectively. That’s why the woman behind culturally rooted, sanskari daily soaps on TV churned out tonally divergent shows like Gandii Baat and Ragini MMS: Returns on her now-defunct streaming platform ALTBalaji. But with the advent of smart TV in Indian homes, families began to increasingly watch OTT content together instead of separately on their phones. That gave rise to The Viral Fever’s family-friendly shows like Gullak and Yeh Meri Family. That also explains Ekta’s pivot back to what she knows best — daily soaps, but those that can be positioned as effectively on streaming as they can be on TV.

Many marketing executives, who enthusiastically joined streaming platforms, in order to promote the kind of alternate content, they believed in, have now gone independent to push middle-of-the-road cinema in theatres and indie films at global festivals, and fill the gaps that have long plagued India’s entertainment ecosystem. They neither know “how to sell a Kapil Sharma” nor do they believe a Kapil Sharma needs their selling. But this coexistence of Kapil Sharma and Vir Das on a platform comes at an interesting cultural juncture for India. Sample last year, for instance: audience of both the mainstream and niche turned up in hoards to attend concerts of Diljt Dosanjh, a grounded Punjabi popstar, as well as Coldplay, a British rock-pop band.

That’s also why an audience that once looked down upon Bigg Boss or similar reality shows are now lapping up The Traitors, the Indian adaptation of the globally resonant American show, on Prime Video. “I think they’ve hit the sweet spot with that one. Unlike some versions in the West, they’ve taken a bunch of internet celebrities and made a reality show with them that just has high production value than say, a Bigg Boss,” points out an industry insider. “Having Karan Johar to host it with all his campness intact is a masterstroke — he’s one celebrity who gets equal attention from the classes and the masses, whether it’s love or hate,” adds another. Instead of the crassness associated with Bigg Boss and MTV reality shows like Roadies and Splitsvilla, Traitors rolls out like a saucy game of chess — pretty much like a very expensive, lived-in version of board games like Shasn and Cards Against Humanity.

Karan Johar in The Traitors.

“For every Traitors, there should be a Stolen. But the fact is for every Traitors, there’s also a Khauf, a brilliant horror show that goes under the radar,” says a former employee of Prime Video India, adding, “Streamers made quick money during the pandemic by not just having a captive audience, but also buying ready, big-budget films from production houses waiting to release their films in endless lockdowns. They’ve grown used to that licensing model. So they’re just picking up anything and everything that’s worked in the past, whether from films, sports or TV, instead of developing envelope-pushing content like they did pre-pandemic. Which is why you see how the slate of originals has gone down drastically. Licensed shows which happen to work in the first season are then adopted and then developed like it was their own baby to begin with.”

If picking existing IPs from TV wasn’t enough, streaming has also stooped down to advertisement revenue in order to sustain. Prime Video is the most recent platform to introduce ads and an ad-free premium version, as per the YouTube and Spotify revenue model. “India is a price-sensitive country, so even if you give us the option to pay more and get rid of ads, we’d stick to the ads,” says a former Netflix India employee. They claim that commercials on streaming isn’t new to India, but the hullabaloo is about the way Prime imposed it. “At Netflix, there were designated employees for this job, who scientifically picked points when it could switch to commercial in a way that the audience don’t lose interest. It was transparent and gradual, unlike the blindsiding that Prime has done now,” they add.

Also Read — Sameer Nair feels Indian adaptation of The Office would do far better today: ‘Market was smaller then, wanted to do 11 seasons like US’

Is it really only about the transparency? Should streamers just own it that they want to go where TV did and accept that the daily soaps, broad comedy, reality shows, advertisements, and sports entertainment are their mainstays? The life-sized hoardings of WWE on the Mumbai expressways tell that very story. But is it a bad deal if IPL gets more consumers to subscribe to JioHotstar so they could watch a School of Lies that they otherwise wouldn’t? “I don’t see it that way. Would I really count my show as a success story if it excels in the same months that IPL airs? It’s a good way to show numbers and ask for an appraisal, but those who’re doing this for creative reasons deserve better.” Going back to television is a disservice to the innovation of streaming. As iconic comedian Milton Berle so wisely put it, “We owe a lot to Thomas Edison. If it wasn’t for him, we’d be watching television by candlelight.”

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